If the riders had not willed it so the horses would mutually have
agreed to stop when they met; that being the way of range horses after
carrying speech-hungry men for a season or two. If men meet out there
in the land of far horizons and do not stop for a word or two, it is
generally because there is bad feeling between them; and horses learn
quickly the ways of their masters.

"Hello," greeted Billy tentatively, eying the other measuringly
because he was a stranger. "Pretty soft going, ain't it?" He referred
to the half-thawed trail.

"Ye-es," hesitated the other, glancing diffidently down at the trail
and then up at the neighboring line of disconsolate, low hills.
"Ye-es, it is." His eyes came back and met Billy's deprecatingly,
almost like those of a woman who feels that her youth and her charm
have slipped behind her and who does not quite know whether she may
still be worthy your attention. "Are you acquainted with this--this
part of the country?"

"Well," Billy had got out his smoking material, from force of the
habit with which a range-rider seizes every opportunity for a smoke,
and singled meditatively a leaf. "Well, I kinda know it by sight, all
right." And in his voice lurked a pride of knowledge inexplicable to
one who has not known and loved the range-land. "I guess you'd have
some trouble finding a square foot of it that I ain't been over," he
added, mildly boastful.

If one might judge anything from a face as blank as that of a china
doll, both the pride and the boastfulness were quite lost upon the